The Santa Fe Itch

Recently I made my second sojourn to the Santa Fe area, a
place of breathtaking beauty, fascinating history and distinctive
cuisine. Both visits were brief and touristy -- and so I would
not claim for a moment to have any right to say what I'm about to
say. But I was vividly disturbed both times. I found myself
wanting to Get Far Away, and ever since, I've been trying to
piece together the reasons for this. Here is what I have come up with.

In 1990, as part of an annual conference of Georgist land
reformers, a bus tour set out for an innocent afternoon at Taos
Pueblo (which, I must admit, openly invites just such
mild-mannered busloads of consumers as we undeniably were). This
is an ancient city plying its crafts and trades within sight of
one of the world's most glorious mountain vistas. Be that as it
may, I did not take the whole thing in the best of humor, and my
afternoon there yielded this poem:

Taos Pueblo, 1990

at only 300-odd years of age
the catholic church of Taos Pueblo
is a recent addition to the city

but it has real adobe
a half-inch of it chickenwired over concrete

I believe that someone made sure
I believe that someone heard the land and made sure
that a piece of thin clay skin was knocked away

for busloads of noble advocates
to see, if they could
there is great blasphemy here

inside the shop a nine-year-old kid
bangs his brand new cottonwood and elkhide drum

outside the shop a fifty year old kid
bangs his brand new cottonwood and elkhide drum

the shopkeeper's drum is deeper, and it hurts.
he plays vacantly, and faintly
as if the last heartbeats of the city move his hand

Evocative perhaps, but retrospectively, the poem strikes me
as rather cranky. Recently we made another visit to Taos Pueblo -- under
different circumstances; just my wife and I and our five-month
old in a stroller. I'm glad we did, because this time, instead of
a tawdry travesty I saw a rather sad, and indeed noble, town of
people doing their best to preserve their dignity and what shreds
of their ancient culture they could salvage. Parts of the city
are open to tourists; other parts are private residential streets
and are off limits, but there are no armed police to keep the
conquering consumers out -- just polite, handpainted signs. A
half-dozen young men were working on repairing an adobe wall --
with real mud-and-straw bricks, in the real sun. We considered
taking their picture, but we had declined to pay the $5.00 camera
fee, and so we refrained. It seemed little enough to ask: the
camera fee is an honor system; our camera was in plain sight as
we entered, and we were not required to check it.

What led me to see Taos Pueblo so differently? Perhaps it
was the series of lurid reminders, on the two-hour drive between
Albuquerque and Santa Fe, of the money-making opportunities the
people of Taos had sacrificed in order to maintain the quiet
poverty of their curio shops. Each of the Pueblos is a separate
reservation, a "sovereign" entity of only a few square miles,
surrounded by the conquering nation, on which it must depend for
infrastructure, communication, and -- consumer traffic. Given
such a poor competitive position, it's easy to see why so many of
the Pueblos have turned to the biggest and quickest wealth-
transfer system -- casinos. They dot the landscape, each bigger and
crasser than the next, all fighting to display the coolest
computerized markee. Many, I was told, now run shuttle buses for
the convenience of patrons who have gambled away their
automobiles.

In Taos the sacred work of people's hands has been forced to
become a trivial making of souvenirs, the sadness of that elder's
drum was palpable, and I felt ashamed for being part of a bus
tour -- but in the end, how can one avoid participation in the
blasphemy? I imagine that the people are only a bit less repelled
by having tourists take their pictures than they are by operating
casinos -- nobody likes feeling like a whore -- which is why the
services of prostitutes cost money.

Now, I don't doubt that many of these services are
worthwhile (maybe all of them). But the staggering variety, and
the matter-of-fact sincerity with which they were offered, amazed
me, and I looked up from my green chile-laced breakfast burrito
with a pie-eyed question, "Why?"

Undeniably Santa Fe (the name means "holy faith", does it
not?) is perceived as a spiritual center, perhaps even a Sacred
Site. But that's not what it seems like, not now anyway. No, it
feels palpably like a place of spiritual itching, like something
that has been gravely wounded and never quite healed properly. As
people who have suffered the loss of a limb can still feel
sensations of pain in the "phantom nerves" that their limb once
had, I suspect that the people of Santa Fe must feel the
yearnings of a phantom spirituality left by the amputation of any
true connection with the ancient earth-centered traditions of
that place.

Yes I'm being harsh, and the good people of Santa Fe have
every reason to be insulted by this rant,, but I don't
take it back. No matter how we trivialize or narcotize it, we
really cannot abdicate our rootedness in the earth. Places like
Santa Fe and Taos are under terrific pressure, after all, being
the sites that busloads of busy people (like me!) choose to come
to for such desperate realizations.